


Everything in Your Eyes

by mwestbelle



Category: Bandom, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Community: trope_bingo, Dark, Detective Noir, Empathy, M/M, Organized Crime, Police, Psychic Abilities, Telepathic Sex, Telepathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-02
Updated: 2013-02-02
Packaged: 2017-11-27 21:28:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/666684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mwestbelle/pseuds/mwestbelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gerard's been part of supe crime for the past five years, and he's never seen anything like this. A telepathic noir story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everything in Your Eyes

**Author's Note:**

> This story was written for trope_bingo 2013, prompt "telepathy/mindmeld"
> 
> The use of gloves was inspired by the Curse Workers trilogy by Holly Black, which is awesome and you should read it!
> 
> WARNINGS: This story contains dark themes, please see notes at the end of the work for full spoilery warnings if you're concerned.

Gerard's been part of supe crime for the past five years, and he's never seen anything like this.

"Jesus fuck." Ray pulls up short, stopping just at Gerard's elbow. Gerard can feel Ray's breath on his neck and the sharp prickle of Ray's shock low in his gut. For a minute, he feels like he might throw up, but it's not him that wants to hurl. Then Ray shifts his weight and inhales audibly. The feeling disappears. "I'm sorry, man, shit. I lost it for a second."

"It happens." Gerard shrugs past him, trying to forget the sick feeling that didn't belong to him, heading into the room in front of them. Ray's paying attention now, keeping it tamped down, so Gerard just feels the usual buzz in the back of his head that tells him someone's conscious nearby.

There are an awful lot of people nearby who aren't conscious. The room looks almost like a hospital ward, with the neat lines of metal beds, but also fucking nothing like a hospital ward. It's dark and dirty, cables hanging dangerously low from the ceiling, all hooked up to an ancient system on a spindly desk against the wall. And the beds are full, each one holding a slack body. Gerard gets closer. The first bed holds an older hispanic woman. She's hooked up to an IV, but another tube runs from her wrist, over the cement floor...over to the same system. They're all connected to the computer, Gerard realizes. He moves to the next berth and stares down at the boy there. He looks so young, but his thin pasty limbs are covered in tattoos so he must be older than he looks. Gerard resists the urge to touch. He's working, not wearing his gloves, and the last thing this kid needs is another intrusion on his personal freedom.

"Got a bus on the way. Back-up too." Ray has finally entered the room, walking past Gerard to the far end and turning back to him. "What the fuck happened here?"

Gerard has to tear his eyes off the unconscious boy. He looks at the tube instead, the wire, and follows it over to the desk. The computer is massive, at least ten years old. The standby light is blinking orange on the front of the console. "No clue. But I'm sure as hell planning to find out."

*

When Gerard was a kid, he wanted to be an artist. That was before the Geller-Harris test, before any of this shit became codified and quantified and regulated. When he was a kid, he was an oddball. Now he's a class two psychic, a detective in the NJPD's Supernatural Crimes Division, and, well, still an oddball. But he's a useful oddball, so he gets a shiny badge and a gun instead of a neon handful of inhibitors like some of the kids who didn't make it through the academy.

He's seen a lot of shit, on the job and off, but this case is something else. It has to be the mob (it's always the mob), but what the fuck were they doing with all those psychics? Because they were psychics, every last one of them. From class five all the way up to some twos like him. Getting into the computer is the secret, but tech has been throwing everything they've got at it with no luck. There doesn't even seem to be an operating system on it, but it was doing _something_ to those people. With those people? Gerard has no fucking clue and it makes his head ache with frustration.

He pushes away from his desk, away from the case file and goes to refill his coffee. The best advantage of wearing his gloves in the office is that he can fill up the mug with coffee as hot as he wants, no trouble carrying it. He's pouring the coffee when a shiver runs up his spine, like a sparkler that started in his lower back. 

"Hey, Way." One of the other detectives pokes his head in. "You got a visitor."

"Shit." Gerard dumps a few hearty shakes of powdered creamer into his coffee and grabs a packet of Splenda to carry back to his desk with him. He has to walk carefully to keep from slopping coffee over his hands, but he hurries back and drops into his chair "Sorry about that. How can I help you?"

It's only then that he looks up and sees the kid with the tattoos from the...psychic farm or whatever the fuck the mob was running. He's glad that he put his coffee down. Now that he's face to face with this guy, he can feel the sparks along his spine again like in the breakroom. 

"I just...I wanted to come see what you've found out about that place, or. I gave a statement, but I just...I want those bastards to get caught. If there's anything I can answer, I'll do my best." Awake, the guy doesn't look as young. He's mid-twenties, probably, with a dark mohawk and a silver ring in his nose - that wasn't there when he was unconscious. He's wearing bright red gloves; they draw the eye, make Gerard notice how he's wringing his hands. 

"Great. That's...yeah, that's great." Gerard tugs the file closer to him and flips back to the victim's statements. "And...sorry, your name?"

"Iero."

*

Frank Iero, 25 years old, line cook and class four psychic. He must have been one of the first taken, disappeared after a closing shift at the diner he works at five months ago. He's angry, Gerard can taste the metallic bite of it in the back of his throat with every interview but he forgives him for the bleedthrough; he has an impressive amount of control for a class four. But despite his understandable anger, he always has a snarky quip or a smirk.

He doesn't remember anything about the night he was taken or any of the time in between. He was sedated; he still suffers from insomnia. 

They work all night, sometimes. Going over the details again and again. When Frank took the garbage to the dumpster (just after 3:45AM), what cars were in the parking lot when he came out of the alley (none, but there was a light-colored sedan parked across the street). Which regulars had to be shooed out of the diner when it closed, if any of them were weirdos ("Have you ever known someone who regularly stayed until close at a diner who wasn't a weirdo?") Gerard refills the coffee pot and keeps scribbling notes down on his legal pad, filling page after page with his inky scrawl. Frank sits cross-legged on Gerard's couch, his bare knees poking through his worn jeans.

If Frank was the first, or even the second, there might be a break. Whoever took him was just starting out, hadn't perfected his methods yet. He might have made a mistake. Or he might be a veteran snatcher for the mob, making people disappear for decades with no clues. Gerard rips pages off of the pad, crumples and throws them at the trash can. After Frank leaves, he wakes up on the couch and goes to pick them up again, smoothing each one out and taping it back in place. 

Frank is angry, but he feels other things too. Gerard usually finds being around low-level psychics exhausting. They're broadcasting on a much louder frequency than normal people, and aren't able to adjust their own volume like someone with more finely tuned abilities. Empathy is Gerard's specialty. There was never any question; he didn't even make it out of the parking lot on his way to his first middle school dance before he was brought to his knees, crouched next to his mom's car, vomiting uncontrollably from wave after wave of anxiety that wasn't his. It has it's benefits, working in supe crime, but it's still a daily struggle. But Frank...feeling Frank isn't like anything else. Other people's emotions are sour. They ache, his mind constantly aware that they don't belong. But sometimes he finds himself getting excited when he has no reason to, or nervous, and he realizes that it's Frank's emotion taking root inside him, growing organically and spreading tendrils through him.

There's a time, when he goes to pour them each more coffee and hands the mug to Frank and their fingers brush, just for a second. He sits back down on the couch next to him, and he feels the low hum of arousal start deep in his gut, and even when he focuses, he's not sure who it belongs to.

*

"Are you fucking crazy?" Mikey says, voice barely above a hiss. Gerard hasn't heard Mikey talk like that since he cleaned up. "He's a _victim_. He's part of your _case._ "

"It's not anything. It's not, Mikey." Gerard regrets saying anything. He should have known that Mikey wouldn't understand. He doesn't know Frank, doesn't know what it's like. And Gerard hasn't done anything. He hasn't done anything wrong.

*

The second Gerard walks into the division, Ray is jogging over to him, waving a file. "They figured it out. They fucking hacked that motherfucker."

It was another long night, and Gerard is still groggy even after a _large_ cup of coffee. He takes the file from Ray and pushes his hand over his eyes and up into his hair. "They what?"

"They got into the computer."

The report is long and filled with the kind of technobabble that Gerard will never understand, but he skims it while Ray narrates the basic concepts to him. The tech team finally got the computer from the scene to spill its guts. It's not really clear how because it's fucking unheard of, but it looks like the system was interfacing directly with the psychics, monitoring their brainwaves somehow. 

When it first became clear that psychics were real, that there were people who could _do_ things with their brains, everyone thought it was going to be like a Miss Cleo tarot tea leaves sort of thing, with the predictions and all. In actuality, almost no "psychically gifted" people have any kind of precognition. Anyone who does is heavily recruited immediately, of course, even though all they can really do is get vague feelings about what someone close to them will do in the next week or so. Telekinesis is one of the more common specialties, along with empaths like Gerard. Most psychics are in the lower classes, like Frank, and don't have enough juice to really have a specialty. Precog, like manipulation, is just a pipe dream of governments and criminals.

Unless it's not.

"With all these fucking people, they were able to get a strong enough reading...shit, just check out page five."

Gerard flips through the pages. It's a list, a printout from data trasmitted by the computer, of sports matches. Each outcome is listed along with the date, with a scrawled "confirmed" next to it by one of the techs. The winners of the games were announced by the computer a full week before any of them occured. It's thrilling, a fucking breakthrough at last, but he can't help but feel...disappointed. "Gambling? This whole thing was just a mob bookie scheme?"

"Gee, fuck, think about it." Ray is practically hyperventilating, his hair escaped in waving tendrils from his usual ponytail. He must have worked all night too. "That's the easiest thing in the world to verify and once they knew it worked, fuck. You could find out anything. Who's going to win the election? Whether...fucking Fat Jimmy is going to bump off Freddy Five Fingers. They'd know the fucking _future_."

The mob, harnessing a herd of unconscious people to look into the future. Know everything before it happens, a fantasy that would be hell for law enforcement and any law abiding citizen if it came true. And it looks it already has.

"Why did they pick these people?" Gerard frowns and thinks of the list of victims in his other casefile. A bunch of class threes, the odd class two, Frank and another class four. "If they needed power, why not take all twos?"

Ray plants his hands on his hips: his thinking pose. "They would have wanted them. It makes the most sense but...they'd be missed, wouldn't they? Anyone above a three is pretty much guaranteed to be doing a psychic job. People would notice psychics were disappearing, not just...a bunch of unrelated people."

"It makes them harder to catch." Gerard nods. He reaches into his pocket for a pen. There's so many notes to take; he can't wait to let Frank know they're finally getting somewhere.

*

Frank crawls into Gerard's bed, and he can't remember how he fell asleep. He thinks he walked Frank to the door -- he should have walked Frank to the door, he always does -- but he couldn't have because Frank is here now, his breath hot, his gloves warm and soft against Gerard's forearms. 

"You feel so good, Gerard." He's on top now, his thighs bracketing Gerard's hips and holding on tight. He feels so strong; Gerard knows that he's tough, a scrapper. _They would have had to subdue him, somehow, to take him without making a scene._ "I knew you would, fuck, wanted you so bad."

"I know," Gerard whispers when he can find the words. He feels hot all over, so fucking desperate, and if Frank feels like this every time he gets turned on...god. Gerard wants to reach for Frank, starts to do it, but he's taken his gloves off already. He freezes at the sight of his bare hand, halfway to Frank's face, but Frank reaches forward and wraps his gloved fingers around Gerard's wrist, tugging him up to cup his jaw. The instant he touches skin is incredible, sparks just the like the first time but even stronger, like it's the motherfucking Fourth of July inside his body. He also gets even harder, if that was possible, feeding off of Frank's arousal as though he'd starve without it.

"I want you to touch me." Frank is groaning as he speaks, rubbing his cheek against Gerard's hand and rocking his hips down to meet Gerard's, their dicks pressed together through too many layers of cloth. "I want you to get all the way inside of me, inside my fucking _skull_ , I want you to have everything."

"Shit." Gerard tugs his hand free so he can reach for Frank's jeans, fumbling with the button. He's never gotten so clumsy from lust before, but he has Frank's need pulsing through his body along with his own. "I want this, first. Gotta touch you."

Frank's good at getting naked, just like Gerard knew he would be. He rolls off Gerard for just a moment, kicking himself free of his jeans to reveal nothing but skin and ink underneath. Gerard doesn't remember the last time he saw so much bare skin, but Frank tops it immediately, squirming out of his t-shirt until he's nude in Gerard's bed.

Pale flesh and dark ink against the basic navy blue sheets that Gerard's mom had bought for him when he got his first "grown-up" apartment. They've seen a lot since then, but nothing as beautiful as Frank.

Gerard can't resist the silent invitation. He follows, wrapping his arm around Frank's waist to pull him in and kiss him. It intensifies the arousal tenfold, arousal that was already doubled. Frank is so fucking beautiful; more than that, he's striking. Gerard saw him on that hospital bed, and he hasn't been able to look away since.

"Let me." He mumbles, nosing against Frank's cheek, strugging to form words that can express how badly he's wanting now. Every time more of his skin comes in contact with Frank's, he gets another hit of his emotions, his lust, his excitement. "Let me suck you, Frank, please."

"Shit, of course." Frank closes his hand in Gerard's hair, guides him back so that their eyes meet. His eyes are brilliant, even in the dark. "I want you to."

This, Gerard knows he's good at. He's felt the satisfaction of each hook-up, strong enough to even go through a condom. But he doesn't want sensation filtered through latex, not with Frank. So he crawls down Frank's body and takes him in, no time for discussion. Frank swears above him, but Gerard is too overwhelmed by the wash of emotion to even be satisfied. It's arousal, wonder, a touch of smugness. He wraps his hand around the base of Frank's dick, stroking while he bobs on his cock.

"You are so fucking good," Frank is saying, fingers running through Gerard's hair while he sucks. "So good, Jesus, I never knew...I didn't think. God, you're good."

Gerard groans softly around his dick to let him know that he hears, he appeciates it. Frank's cock isn't especially long, but it fits so well in Gerard's mouth, just the right amount of girth with a nice plump head that he can lap at when he pulls off.

He goes until Frank's thighs are starting to tremble, then beyond. He knows Frank is only a four, but he pushes as much of himself into the blowjob as he can, _feeling_ as strongly as he can while he sucks and swallows around him. If Frank can feel even a fraction of what Gerard is feeling off of him.... The emotional feedback from Frank is starting to get overwhelming, making his head feel buzzy in a warm, strange way. He feels sort of like a glass that's been filled to the very brim and then overflowing, with new emotion pouring into him all the time but not enough space to hold it all. It's almost like at the dance, but this doesn't make him sick. It's euphoria, and when he feels the hitch of Frank's hips, the spike of his arousal, he's coming in his pants a second before Frank comes against his tongue.

"Thank you," Frank whispers, carding his fingers through Gerard's hair. Gerard keeps at Frank's cock as it softens; he doesn't want to give up this connection, but eventually Frank whines and pushes him away. Gerard surrenders, crawling up beside Frank to wrap his arm around his waist. He can at least have this contact. He doesn't care about the sticky mess going cool and tacky in his pants or the thousand ethics violations he just made. This is all he wants.

*

Mikey calls again. He lets the phone go to voicemail.

*

The break with the computer seemed like it was a dam bursting open, but it turns out to be just a crack that water can trickle through. They know what was happening now, but still no idea which family is behind it or how they managed to abduct all of those people without any of them remembering being taken.

It means a lot of long nights at work, reinterviewing all the _other_ victims, hashing out theories with Ray. He has to give up a lot of his time with Frank because, as much as he hates to admit it, he's really covered Frank's story inside and out. There isn't anything new he can glean from yet another interview. Plus, their interviews don't stay productive for very long anymore.

Ray's newest pet theory is that the mob was paying off the victims; there's no way that many people could disappear and not a single one end up with some useful evidence. Gerard knows that's ridiculous, but to say so would be admitting a way more personal connection than he ought to have, so he's stuck poring over the financials alongside his partner.

In the first three he reviews, there's absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. Charges for gas stations, groceries, rent. No suspicious transfers or deposits. The next report he grabs is Frank's, and he flips through it with a little bit of interest. There are a lot of charges to bars and music venues, not surprising. Pizza delivery, convenience stores, a used bookshop--

Gerard squints at the charge. The used bookshop is the last charge on Frank's card before he went missing, and it's...wrong. 

"Ray," he says. He feels a little bit like he's floating, stomach gone cold and hollow. "Come look at this." Ray rolls his chair over and leans into his space.

"What? Last charge on the fifteenth, the day he disappeared, right?"

Gerard's mouth is dry. "He got grabbed after work. It was the morning of the fifteenth, fucking...four in the morning. This is from the day of."

"Shit." Ray's brow furrows. He hasn't even bothered to put his hair in a ponytail today. "Is there a mistake in his statement? He started the shift on the fifteenth, yeah, it ran over the sixteenth and that's when he actually got snatched?"

It's a reasonable suggestion, but Gerard has been over this with Frank a thousand times. He said that he was taken on the fifteenth, he _always_ said he was taken on the fifteenth. Frank lied to him.

"I gotta go." Gerard pushes abruptly back from the desk and grabs his coat.

"What the fuck, man?"

"I have to...I gotta check something out." Gerard pulls his coat on, and he's already walking out of the unit without waiting for a response. If Ray says anything else, Gerard can't hear him over the blood rushing in his ears.

*

Frank's address is in his file, but Gerard's never been to his apartment before. It seemed totally natural, but now it feels suspect. Gerard hates feeling like this about Frank, fucking... _Frank_ , but he's not all mind tricks. He's a cop, he's got instincts, and his instincts are telling him something is rotten.

The building is old, but not too crappy. The kind of place a young guy more interested in the "urban feel" than high-functioning plumbing would live. There's no buzzer or anything on the front door; Gerard heads up a flight of stairs to Frank's apartment. He can hear sound from the inside, a steady hum of noise like a radio is on. He tests the knob...it's unlocked.

He opens the door as quietly as possible. The entrance opens up onto the living room. And old boombox on the floor is playing Oldies hits. Both windows are open. Gerard tucks his hand inside his jacket, rests it on the butt of his gun. He flinches, but doesn't draw, when Frank wanders in from a doorway. He's holding a bowl that he promptly drops, sending ceramic shards and cereal across the floor.

"Gerard? Jesus fuck, what are you doing here? Did you knock? Sorry, I listen to this shit way too loud." He bends to turn the volume knob down, looking away from Gerard. Like he still trusts him implicitly, like even with this weird scenario he has no reason to be suspicious. It makes Gerard second guess himself. "What's up? Was there a new break?"

"Kind of." Gerard still has the sick _wrong_ feeling, even now that he's nervous, unsure. He can't place it. "Why did you lie about when you were abducted?"

"Lie?" Frank's whole face changes, crumpling up, and he's so fucking genuine, Gerard has never been more unsure in his life. "I never lied, why would you think that?"

"I checked your fucking financials. You used your credit card ten hours after you were supposed to have been taken."

Frank visibly relaxes. "So someone stole my card. God, Gee, give me a heart attack, why don't you?"

Gerard wants to believe that, already tried that theory in his mind a hundred times on the drive over. He has to shake his head. "Sure, someone stole your card and used it to buy twenty bucks worth of merchandise at Sal's Used and Rare Books then never again. And you never reported a card missing, c'mon, Frank. I'm not that stupid."

But as he said it, he realizes what the weird feeling is and he _is_ that stupid, he is so fucking stupid. Because what he feels is nothing. There isn't a single drop of bleedthrough from Frank. There's no way that a class four without any formal training could even come close to controlling his emotions at this level, even most of the guys at the station can't.

He draws his gun. "Who are you?" 

Frank sticks his hands up as soon as he sees the gun, looks so fucking _scared_ , and Gerard can't feel a thing. Not a fucking thing, except the pounding of his own heart, how his palms are starting to sweat.

"Don't even try it." He keeps his voice steady only through years of training, when all he wants to do is lie on the floor and cry. How could he have been so easily taken in? He abandoned his fucking _ethics_ without a second thought for this scumbag. He... "You aren't a class four, and you definitely aren't a fucking line cook, so what the fuck are you?"

The scared look melts off Frank's face so easily that you would never guess it was there. He smiles, slow and easy, molasses sweet. "Pointing your gun at me really isn't going to help. Do you want to put it away, or should I help you?"

Gerard has no intention of so much as taking his finger off the trigger, so it's a shock when a moment later his hands are empty, down at his sides.

"Thanks, baby." Frank smirks. There's only one answer, and if it's fucking impossible, all the better. This whole day has been impossible.

"You're a manipulator." Gerard has never thought he'd say it out loud, but Frank's face breaks into an irrespressible grin, the kind of grin he used to get when he finally pushed the legal pad out of Gerard's lap and crawled in there himself, and he knows that he's right. "You...made me have sex with you."

"That's laying it on pretty thick, don't you think?" Frank arches one eyebrow. "It's not like you needed much convincing."

Gerard doesn't even have time to parse all of it out now; he's too busy reeling. Precog and manipulation becoming actual tangible things, all in one case. He's heard the rumors, of course, that manipulation was real, hushed up by the government. That anyone who showed a hint of it was drafted in childhood into some shadowy federal kiddie bootcamp. Or, apparently, the mafia version.

"You were the one who took them." Gerard meets Frank's eyes, even though it seems dangerous. Looking a real manipulator in the eyes. But Frank's done a perfectly good number on him without him ever knowing it; he's pretty sure eye contact doesn't have anything to do with it. "And you didn't even have to lift a finger. You just...made them go with you and made them forget."

"I'm a handy guy." Frank shrugs, but he's smirking, and Gerard can tell that he's enjoying it. Not from the run-off, Frank still has all of that locked down tight and god, he must be a two with control like this. He might even be a one. Might as well be, a legendarily strong psychic with a mythical psychic power. It makes the kind of sense that only exists in the bugfuck crazy day Gerard is having. No, he can tell Frank enjoys this because, as much as Frank has been playing him, he _knows_ him now. "People respect my...specialized talents."

"Why the fuck were you there?" Gerard can't help but frown, trying to puzzle all this out. "Why would they risk you, when you already did your job?"

"If I give you the answers," Frank says, "how are you ever going to learn for yourself?"

"This isn't a fucking _game_." Gerard regrets the outburst immediately, because Frank's expression goes cold. In that moment, he realizes the true depth of the shit he's in. Frank can make him do literally anything. Shoot himself with his own service weapon. Go on a rampage in the apartment building. Jump off a fucking bridge onto the expressway. Tell the whole station about how he fucked a victim of one of his most high-profile cases.

Frank walks towards him, and Gerard finds himself falling to his knees. Frank drops to one knee in front of him and reaches in his jacket, groping around more than necessary before pulling his gun out of its holster. "I'm just going to take this with me. You're going to wait here until I'm gone, and then...I don't care what the fuck you do."

Gerard's heart is hammering, his gut churning, and Frank's face is inches away from him. Close enough to kiss, and he's disgusted with himself for still wanting to. "Will you tell me one thing?"

There's a flicker of a smile again. "Depends on the thing."

"Why go to the bookstore?" Gerard swallows hard against his dry throat. "You...if you hadn't gone, I never would have figured it out. It's...fucking crazy, no one ever would have guessed this shit. It fucked up your whole story, just one discrepancy. Why did you do it?"

Frank looks at him for a long moment without blinking. Gerard thinks maybe he's going to change his mind about letting Gerard live. But then he nods, slightly. "I fucking like books. I was going to be stuck for god knows how long stalking people to kidnap, and I wanted to have something to read."

And then he's moving, moving in so quickly that Gerard thinks he's going to headbutt him, but it's a kiss, harsh and nasty and deep. Frank shoves his hand deep into Gerard's hair and bites at his lips, lets their teeth knock together, and Gerard hates himself for opening his mouth to it. He tells himself that it's for safety, so Frank doesn't get pissed and decidee to make him walk out the window, but. He tells himself a lot of things. And when Frank kisses him, he lets go. He can feel the anger, the lust, the smugness, just like before, but now there's an undercurrent of darkness that he never got before. It's bitter, but in an alluring way. Like dark, dark chocolate. 

With a last tug at his hair, Frank pulls away. He grins, and then he's gone. Gerard knows that he can't get up, not yet, and he doesn't even try. He kneels on the floor of the empty apartment and licks his bruised lips, pretending that he's not looking for one last taste.

**Author's Note:**

> FULL WARNINGS: This story includes references to psychically forced suicide and murder, sex that was caused through psychic manipulation, sex that occurs between a police officer and a victim of a crime he is investigating, people being held captive and unconscious (possible medical triggers)


End file.
